


Enchanted

by AwesomeEyeroll



Category: Outlander & Related Fandoms, Outlander (TV), Outlander Series - Diana Gabaldon
Genre: AU, F/M, fairy tale, prompt, two part
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-23
Updated: 2018-05-22
Packaged: 2019-05-10 09:09:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14734097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AwesomeEyeroll/pseuds/AwesomeEyeroll
Summary: This is based on a prompt from the Lallybroch Library prompt exchange.





	1. Chapter 1

It had been a long day. Claire could never have imagined Uncle Lamb had so much stuff. The executor of his will had contacted her out of the blue three weeks ago about a recently discovered room in a quaint highland village. The house had belonged to a friend of Lamb’s, a fellow archaeologist and when he himself had passed, five years after the death of Uncle Lamb himself, a veritable cornucopia of boxes, bookshelves and chests had been uncovered in the back bedroom. By all accounts, Lamb had been using this room as storage for the better part of his fifty year career in antiquities and now that fifty years had to be unpacked, catalogued and repacked either to be donated to various museums and libraries or to make the trip back home to Manchester with Claire.

She’d been at it all day and had barely unpacked a dozen boxes. She was sticky and itchy and she was fairly certain she had cobwebs in her hair. She glanced at her watch. 5pm. One more box and she’d call it a day. The quaint boutique hotel down the road with its enormous claw foot bathtub and a massive Islay gin and tonic beckoned. Steeling herself for the final push she hauled the final box from the top shelf and lifted the lid releasing a cloud of dust which made her cough uncontrollably.   
“Thanks a bunch, Uncle Lamb” she muttered to herself as she rubbed her eyes.

The box seemed much like the previous dozen from the same shelving unit. Several large books of dubious antiquity, and no doubt written in a language she didn’t understand. She sighed once more and pulled out the first book.

The box contained ten books in all, most of which, predictably, were written in some long dead language of which she could make only the simplest sense of. It had been quite some time since she had used greek or latin beyond that which was required in her medical studies and her persian had remained non-existent. She flipped them onto the pile for the local university. She lifted the final book from the box. It was heavier than the others and despite having festered at the bottom of this box for anything up to half a century seemed less aged than the others. It was old, of that there was no doubt, but the book had vitality to it that one rarely saw in books of a great age. It lacked the fragility of ancient text, the feeling that with a clumsy move they could crumble into dust. This book felt, well robust.   
“You’ve been here too long” she muttered to herself shaking her head to clear her thought. She wiped the green leather cover with her sleeve.   
“Am Prionnsa Ruadh”, The Red Prince. She ran her hands across the embossed cover before flipping it open.

It appeared to be a fairy tale. Perching on top of a nearby chest she began to read.

“Once upon a time…” she read. It appeared to be the story of a Scottish Prince…  
“... tall and red headed much desired, for he was known to be handsome, good and kind. Set to inherit a mighty kingdom many a laird brought their daughter to his father’s lands hoping to secure the hand of the red prince for their daughter. Still, the prince decreed he would marry only for love and whilst he was always kind and never cruel he danced only one dance with each of the young women presented to him. One day a lord from a foreign land came. With him he brought his two daughters. Both were fair beyond the telling with chestnut hair and wide hazel eyes. They had witty conversation and could dance and sing and converse in many languages. The younger of the girls was kind and sweet and she soon caught the eye of the handsome Lord Grey. Her sister though, whilst as sweet of visage, had a cruel and cold heart. She desired the red prince and would not be denied. She tried all things to woo him to her. She danced the most graceful dances, she wore her softest silks. She sang songs of love and devotion and when that did not work she visited the bean-shidh of Broch Morda. A woman of renowned power. She gave the girl a charm which would help the prince to love her, to see her. But the girl had a cold and vengeful spirit. What if it were to fail, she asked. The Bean-shidh smiled her toothless smile. And handed the girl a book. If the Prince’s will was too strong for the charm, if he would not bend to her will, then she could make sure that he never found the true love he sought. Say the words and his soul will be trapped in the book for all eternity. 

The girl, Geneva, took the charm and the book and that night was a magnificent ball. As she danced with the Prince she muttered her charm and waited. As the dance ended she leaned towards him, expecting the kiss she felt she deserved, but the prince rebuffed her, the charm had failed. Incandescent with rage the girl called out the curse, pulling the book from her pocket. The music stopped and all turned at her terrible cries. The Prince fell to his knees and in a moment was gone. The book in the girl’s hand now telling the story of the kind, young prince. Horrified, the people of the court demanded Geneva undo her spell, half gleeful, half afraid the girl declared that she did not know how. The Bean-Shidh was summoned and she laughed her hollow laugh. The Prince had sought a true love and now only a true love could free him from the prison of the book. The King and Queen were heartbroken and decreed that the Bean-Shidh be imprisoned in a room without doors or windows for the rest of her days. Geneva, the wicked girl, was to be banished to the tower on the lake, there to abide in loneliness and despair for all her days. And the book, the book was placed in a case in the library. Waiting. Waiting for the Prince’s true love to come and free him from his jail.”

Claire wiped a tear from her eye. It was such a sad story, and like so many traditional fairy tales which had not been through the mouse house of Disney, there was no happy ending. The Prince remained trapped. His mother died from the heart break. His father never spoke a word in joy for the rest of his days.

Flipping to the final page Claire read the final passage out loud.

“Once upon a lonely day   
When true love is revealed  
The Prince will come and will be free  
And all wounds shall be healed.”

With a sigh, Claire closed the book and looked up. 

There, standing in front of her, looking equally bemused, was a tall red headed man.


	2. Part 2

They stared at each other for a moment and then both started to scream.

Claire pitched backwards ending up in a heap behind the chest she had been sitting on whilst the man fell backwards landing with a thud on the wooden floor in cloud of dust. Peering from behind the relative protection of the chest, it was Claire who recovered herself first.  
“What in the name of ever loving fuck…? Who..? Wha..? Where…?” She stared at him eyes wide.   
For his part the man was alternating staring frantically around the room with looking at Claire agog.

“What..? Where..? Huh..?” came his equally inarticulate responses.

Seeing the man did not seem to have any hostile intention, and in fact seemed even more discombobulated than she did, Claire crawled inelegantly around the chest sitting in front of it facing the man. For what could have been only a few seconds or several hours they looked at each other in silence. Claire then took a deep breath and attempted to compose herself.

“Where did you come from? How did you get up the stairs without me hearing you?”

“Stairs?” the man replied. “ I don’t… I didn’t... “ He threw his hands up slightly. “I was dancing, and then I wasn’t. And now I’m here.” 

“Dancing?” Claire glanced down at the book which she still held in her right hand. His eyes followed the direction of her gaze.

“It can’t.. You can’t…. Oh my God. I have to be dreaming. I’ve fallen asleep and now I’m having some weird dream.” She pinched herself hard. She was definitely awake.

“Oh my god” she whispered. 

Despite his very sudden and rather startling appearance, she felt no fear of or threat from this man.She held the book out to him with a shaking hand. He reached forward and took it from her, brushing her fingertips slightly as he did so. Claire was alarmed to feel her stomach tilt slightly at his touch. 

He opened the book and began to read. She looked at him and she could could see the horror mounting on his face. He reached the end and very calmly closed the book and placed it on the ground next to him. 

“How long?” he spoke so softly that the barely heard him. “H, how long? How old is that book?”

Her stomach dropped as she realised what he was asking her. 

“I don’t know, I’m not sure. But its old. At least three hundred years I think, maybe longer”

His head fell forward, his shaggy red hair forming a curtain around his face. Claire found herself holding her breath. She watched as a small wet patch formed on the dusty floor as the silent tears fell from the man’s eyes. 

“I’m sorry.” It seemed inadequate, it was inadequate. 

“So they are all gone, and I am alone” he didn’t look up.

“I’m sorry” she repeated wishing she knew what else to say. As a doctor she was used to awkward circumstances and tears but she wasn’t usually dealing with what was apparently a 300 year old prince who she had somehow freed from a story book.

“Jesus H Roosevelt Christ” She exclaimed as the realised the reality, or lack thereof, of the situation she was currently in.

The man had looked up at the sound of her voice. A single tear running down his cheek. His eyes were very blue. 

“Where am I?” his voice was soft.

“Scotland, 2018” she answered. “We’re in a small village called Broch Morda currently.”

He sighed, seeming to digest this information. Tears still streamed down his face and he wiped at them unseeingly. He shuddered in a visible effort to pull himself together before failing and dropping his head again. A half suppressed sob forced itself from his throat and before she had even consciously formed the thought, Claire was by his side holding his massive frame in her arms. She pulled him to her, his face buried in her shoulder as she rocked him slowly almost like one would rock a crying child. The urge she felt to comfort this strange man, to believe his impossible story overrode her usual reserve. Orphaned young and raised in unconventional circumstances by a bachelor uncle, she was warm but not given to casual physical affection. But something about this young man touched her soul. He felt warm and solid in her arms and she had the strangest feeling of being comforted even whilst giving comfort. His arms were around her waist now as he clung to her, but his shuddering was slowly subsiding. After a few moments, he was calm as they both sat there on the dusty floor of a back room. Claire could hear the blood in her ears and feel the beat of his heart against her body where she held him close. They both shifted slightly and navy blue eyes met brown. For a moment, everything around Claire seemed to still. Dust hung suspended in the light from the window, the birds outside the only sound. He lifted his hand and ran a finger down her cheek. “Mo Nighean donn” he whispered. Claire had no idea what the words meant, but the urge to move only an inch and press her lips to his was almost overwhelming. 

She shifted slightly and in the process dislodged a pile of books earmarked for the Edinburgh University. The crash startled them both and they sprang apart. Claire scrambled to her feet as she try to work out exactly what she was going to do with a tall red headed man who may or may not have been trapped in a story book for three hundred years. She couldn’t leave him here in the house and she couldn’t in all good conscience leave him to roam Broch Morda alone.Wiping her hands on the legs of her jeans she came to a decision. 

Reaching forward she pulled the man up to standing before releasing him and holding out her hand. “Claire, I’m Claire”

“James, or Jamie if you prefer” He made a leg in a most courtly fashion over their clasped hands and his lips brushed the back of her hand ever so lightly. Goosebumps rippled her flesh at the contact. His lips were warm and dry and she suppressed the fleeting thought of what they might feel like on other parts of her body. She shook her head to clear it.

“Right, well then...Jamie” He smiled slightly at this. “We can’t stay here all night and I definitely can’t leave you wondering the Highlands, so I guess you’re going to have to come with me” She said all this with more bravura than she felt as she attempted to gain some control over the events of the last hour or so. Jamie nodded slightly and gestured to her to lead the way.

######

On arrival at her hotel, Claire had never been more grateful for the quiet parking tucked away round the back nor the fact it was possible to reach her room from there without having to pass through reception. The car journey from Broch Morda had been tense as Jamie had tightly clenched his eyes shut and turned a worrying shade of pistachio green as she had navigated the winding roads back into Inverness. By the time she pulled into the carpark, Jamie’s head was in his hand as he murmured what she was fairly certain was the Lord’s Prayer in latin. As she gently helped him from the car, his size and highland dress seemed even more innocuous amongst the Ford Mondeos and people carriers which populated the small parking area. Standing to his full height, he took a deep and shaky breathe before wrinkling his nose. 

“City smells’ she said “probably not what you are used to’

Gesturing she led the way through the back entrance to the hotel leading him quickly down the corridor to her ground floor room, she looked quickly around before bundling him through the door and shutting it tightly behind them. One thing she had learned from her three days at “The Loch” hotel was that Mrs Forbes the head housekeeper was a voracious gossip and she had no desire to become part of her colourful tales. 

Claire’s forward planning had extended only as far as getting him into the room and now they were here she the strangeness of recent events come back to her. Jamie stood close to the window fiddling with the edge of his plaid whilst Claire thought desperately about what she should do next. 

“Have you any food, Sassenach?” Jamie broke the silence. “Apparently it's been three hundred years since I had my supper and I’m a wee bit peckish” The good humour in both his voice and face broke the tension and Claire laughed. She picked up the phone and ordered them both soup and a lamb stew for Jamie. When the doorbell rang she ushered Jamie into the bathroom whilst she dealt with food and money.

A startled exclamation from behind the bathroom door was followed quickly by the emergence of a large dripping wet highlander. He shrugged sheepishly. “I was lookin’ at all the tubes and hoses in that room”

“You found the shower, I take it? Claire laughed and flipped her curls away from her face. Jamie smiled back at her. Throwing a bathrobe in his direction she indicated that he should change. As she fussed with their dinner she caught a glimpse of Jamie’s reflection in the mirror. Strong viking shoulder and, and scars. Terrible, white and pink scars which covered his entire back. She gasped as she whirled round. Jamie emerged from the bathroom dressed in a fluffy white bathrobe his damp hair pushed off his face. Claire felt her knees wobble slightly but quickly recovered herself, putting it down to a long day in poor lighting and not enough food. She sat down at the small table and they ate in silence for a while. Occasionally smiling up at each other over their spoons or the edge of their water glass.

As knives and forks were set down, stomachs full, it was time for some frank and serious conversation. Despite her usually rational and scientific approach to life she was somehow willing to suspend her disbelief and accept that the man with the fiery red hair and piercing blue eyes in front of her was a prince from long ago recently freed from a story book. What she was less sure about was what happened from here.

“I guess we need to have a wee chat, aye?” Jamie asked as if reading her thoughts. She nodded in the affirmative.

“What do you remember?”

With a sign of resignation Jamie leaned back slightly and recounted his tale. It was pretty much as the book had told it. He was dancing with the Lady Geneva and the next he knew he was in the back room of a Broch Morda Cottage with no rememberance or awareness of the last 300 years. 

“So I suppose the big question is,” Claire picked up the book from the bed. “Is how did I manage to free you? This book is 300 hundred years old. There is no way that I can possibly be the only person who has read it in all that time. I mean, Uncle Lamb, surely he must have flicked through it least.” 

Jamie shrugged “I dinna ken” He looked at the ground, his shoulder’s slumping. The sight made Claire’s heart hurt. 

“There must be something” She said in frustration. She flicked through the book searching for something, anything that might reveal why she, of all the people who must have read the book in the last three centuries had somehow freed him.

Flipping to the back, her eyes caught the verse on the last page.

“Once upon a lonely day   
When true love is revealed  
The Prince will come and will be free  
And all wounds shall be healed.”

She passed the book to Jamie. “I read this bit aloud, and poof! There you were”  
The corners of Jamie’s mouth lifted slightly as he took the book from her. His forehead wrinkled slightly as he read it.   
“I don’t really know what it's supposed to mean and obviously when I was reading it the first time I just assumed it was a slightly dramatic end to a fairly tragic fairy tale” She shrugged.

“Weel, Sassenach” Jamie sounded slightly tense and mildly apologetic. “If I am reading this wee verse right it’s actually a charm and that’s why it freed me”

Claire sat up at this. “But if simply reading the charm out loud would free you why did no one free you sooner?”

Jamie shifted once again in his chair, his demeanour distinctly more uncomfortable now.

“Mmmph, well its no so simple you see. The charm would free me but only in a very specific set of circumstances”

Claire laughed at this. “What in a back bedroom in Broch Morda by a woman covered in cobwebs”

Jamie’s smiled slightly before taking a deep breath. “No, Claire. I could only be freed if this charm was recited by my one true love”  
Colour rose in Jamie’s face at this last statement whilst the colour drained completely from Claire’s. She mouthed helplessly for a few moments trying to find words she was looking for. How could she possibly be his one true love? They were born 300 years apart. She was an English doctor and he was, apparently a Scottish Prince who until recently had resided inside an actual fairy tale. She moved agitatedly trying to find both the words and actions that she needed. She opened her mouth once more to tell him he was wrong, but instead found herself moving forward and closing the distance between them. And then she kissed him. 

 

Her world tilted slightly on its axis as her lips met his. They were soft, warm and pliant. She brought her arms up around his neck , tangling her fingers in the hair at the nape of his neck. It was soft in her hands and she felt his arms up up around her. One hand flat on the small of her back, so big it almost covered it, pulling her closer to him as the both relaxed into the kiss, lips parting, tongues meeting, tentatively at first and then with more intensity. When finally the kiss broke they were both breathing heavily and unsteadily, their foreheads pressed together, their eyes closed.   
“Mo Nighean Donne” he murmured  
“What does that mean?”   
“My brown haired lass” Claire kissed him again smiling against his mouth.   
“My red prince” Jamie’s chuckle reverberated down her spine.

Finally they broke apart, both of them grinning like idiots.

“Looks like fairy tales are real after all”

 

Epilogue.  
And the prince and his true love married and had a four children each with the red hair of their father and the strange whiskey coloured eyes of their mother. The Prince learned to master both his stomach and the strange horseless carriage that were popular in this new time and they spend many a magical weekend driving through the Highlands of Scotland whilst their father told the tale of the Red Prince in the book and how he had been freed from his prison by a beautiful and courageous woman with brown curly hair which caught the sun and made her seem like an angel to him. The children did delight in the this tale insisting on telling it over and over again. They would whisper to each other that surely, their father must be that Prince, look how tall he was, how handsome, look at his gleaming red hair. That surely the woman who saved him with her love must be their mother, look at how she looks at him, the softness in her eyes, the small smile that plays on her lips when he brushes past her, when he lifts his hand and gently strokes a stray curl from her face. And the book, the book with no writing which sits in the glass case, surely that must be the book of which their parent’s spoke when they told this tale. The children would watch their mother and father as they sat together whispering quietly to each other, smiling, touching softly, unconsciously. 

And they really did live happily ever after.


End file.
